Regional Description – Central and South America, Including Caribbean Islands

The paleoclimate archives of the tropics and marginal tropics from Mexico to southern Brazil and their interpretation are presented and critically discussed. The importance of Quaternary glaciations for climate reconstruction is particularly emphasized and related to Quaternary environmental changes in the Central and South American lowlands. Older glacier traces, often dated much too young, provide evidence of thermal and hygric climatic fluctuations since the early Quaternary that were much greater than the climatic changes of the last ice age. The maximum glaciation of the Little Ice Age occurred in the Southern Hemisphere around CE 1700, north of the equator around CE 1850. Cold phases are characterized by greater aridity in the lowlands. The orbital and solar influence on large and small climate variations is documented by many different paleoclimate archives. Terrestrial South American paleoclimate data are correlated predominantly with Arctic and less with Antarctic data. Climate modeling rarely considers the terrestrial paleoclimate data of the New World tropics. The extent to which climate influenced human cultures is discussed using Central America as an example and is further elaborated in Chap. 9 .